


[BioLock]

by b00mgh



Category: BioShock, BioShock Infinite, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Hudson and Stamford are the cocaptains, I Ain't Sorry, M/M, Multi, Other, Sherlock characters are bioshock characters, TJLC | The Johnlock Conspiracy, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-21 01:22:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9525290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b00mgh/pseuds/b00mgh
Summary: *Works best if you know the plotlines of Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite, and Sherlock (the BBC TV series) but if you wanna wing this, you go find that desperate confusion, my man*Think Bioshock (the first one), with Sherlock characters, then add Bioshock Infinite crossover, with more Sherlock characters, then twist that around until it looks like a really complicated pretzel, throw in some Johnlock, and maybe even some Mystrade, and a not-as-depressing ending.In other words:A man survives a plane crash into the Atlantic Ocean, swims to a conveniently located lighthouse, and descends in a submarine to an underwater city called Rapture. Then the real weird stuff starts happening.





	1. I

They told me, "Son, you're special. You were born to do great things."

You know what? They were right.

 

People scream, not for long. Most of the people on the plane were high-class socialites or businessmen; cropped gowns and pressed suits don’t do well for swimming. Especially when you’re dumb enough to try and save that carry-on luggage instead of dislodging a flotation device from under your seat.

The small pad of foam doesn’t do much in the way of keeping me on top of the Atlantic, but I survive when I hit the water and that’s really all I needed from the thing. I can swim just fine, I didn’t dress in a pressed suit and I didn’t try to save my carry on-- if I had one.

Did I have a carry-on bag?

What was I doing on that plane?

Nevermind, swimming is more important.

The flotation device has left me for the tender kiss of fresh air and it’s all I can do not to sigh at myself for letting go of it. My arms and legs push me up, which is easy to identify because that’s where the fire is and where all these shoes and bags and necklaces are falling from.

I allow myself a few seconds to appreciate the oxygen I have earned at the surface and scowl at my surroundings. There is fire clinging to everything that can float, which cuts off almost every escape option except one slim path, behind which I can see the tail of the plane I was (probably) on before and a disused lighthouse. My obstacles have outlined my path pretty damn clearly and I head for the lighthouse.

The whole thing is stone, which feels blessedly solid under my feet as I emerge from the freezing waves of the midnight Atlantic. There really isn't much to note on the exterior, just a stone cylinder with a dead light at the top, and two sets of stairs into ocean on either side of a pair of doors. The doors are what really catch my eye: rusting gold with a stoic figure chiseled in angular silence, also, they're already open. That's strange because no sounds of life remain anywhere around me. If there isn't a person, there shouldn't be an open door.

Should there?

Isn't this lighthouse a little too conveniently located?

Nevermind, it's either go in or stay outside, and I'm not sure there's going to be a boat as conveniently located as this lighthouse.

No lights appear to be on, but when I step inside the doors shut ominously behind me and a few lights flicker to life-- although obviously in a less grandiose way than was intended by whoever made the entryway. The effect is instead eerie as a display is illuminated in front of me. A man’s stern face looks above, with a blood red banner hung beneath it reading “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.” I frown thoughtfully. Unlike the outside door, these two things remain untouched by elements and exactly as they were intended to be viewed by tourists like me, minus the shit lighting.

I follow the dusting red carpet underfoot around the display and down a half-flight of stairs, then down another flight, and just as I'm beginning to wonder how far down this increasingly poorly lit trail goes I am presented with something akin to a submarine. This vehicle is spotless-- very conspicuously-- and has only a single lever-- also conspicuously. Something like instinct draws me into the sub and something like habit brings my hand down on the lever. It isn't like there's anything for me on the surface anyway.

Is there?

Who even am I?

Nevermind, I lookout the window on the sub. My view includes a descent below the ocean's surface. Various markers show in gold “10 Fathoms” and “18 Fathoms”. I should be shocked, but I'm not. This all feels comfortable, familiar.

Why does this feel familiar?

What am I doing?

Nevermind, the window is more important. The view is blocked by a projection, slightly aged but working just fine. The image projected is of a man, the same man from the lighthouse entryway, but less stern and more relaxed. He's sitting at a desk in a nice suit-- like the businessmen from the plane, but a few steps up. He says, in a voice that sounds like he drinks champagne with every dinner and orders someone to order it for him, “I am Mycroft Holmes, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, Where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.” I scoffed, but went dead silent when the scratchy projection wiped away to reveal my apparent destination.

It was a city, all skyscrapers and bright fluorescent lights and billboard ads and pedestrians. It was also underwater; skyscrapers came up and fell down from piped metal bases; fluorescents were the only garish illumination this deep underwater; billboard ads wavered with the waters distorting current; pedestrians were less anthropomorphic and more gilled, even a small whale skirted the city edge.

Nothing in my mind questions the possibility of this, of an Atlantis in the Atlantic. To me the more unnerving thing is the possibility of life without jellyfish outside the window or watery abyss all around.

How does one survive surrounded by sunlight?

Why does this feel like a homecoming?

Nevermind, the sub has ceased motion in my reverie, but the door stays shut.

I want to curse the inconvenience, but realize the blessing of it when two figures are lit up by flickering lights. One backs away from the other, he has no discernible features besides a workman’s shirt because his back is turned to me.  He cowers away from the other person, babbling appeasing nonsense.

“I'll leave, I'll get out of your territory! Just don't kill me!”

I can see why, the other person isn't really so much a woman as some bloated and twisted and modified version of what could have probably been human many years ago. She has hooks attached to the outside of her wrists and she tears the poor man in front of her to pieces before moving to my sub.

“Is it someone new?” She hisses, her gaping mouth a mess of gums and scar tissue with the occasional tooth dug in unnaturally.

I stay silent, still. She jumps straight up with strength that is about as human as her appearance. No one does that in one broken stiletto. No one. There is the gut-wrenching sound of metal-on-metal, but eventually the thing must decide it can't break through the sub and jumps away, sprinting off down a hallway I can't see.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Exploring Rapture with our protagonist!

A radio crackles and that makes me jump a little, because that's a noise that is deliberate and aware of my existence, which I had comfortably assumed no one was.

“Would you kindly pick up the radio?” A honeyed voice asks. A little bewildered and a lot curious, I locate a short-wave radio on the wall of the sub and tuck it into my belt.

“Hi there.” The voice greets and I figure it is a man, mid thirties to early forties, possibly Irish descent. “Now I don’t know how you managed to survive that plane crash, but I’m not one to question providence.” He has a point, how _did_ I survive? Sure I had my flotation device but I couldn’t have been the only one. Nevermind, people are more important.  “Oh, I’m Richard. Richard Brook.” The voice added hastily. “And if I have any say in it, I aim to keep you alive. Let’s get a move on, you need to get to higher ground. Now take a deep breath and step out of the bathysphere.” I hesitate, thinking that that is a really strange thing to call the apparently-not-a-submarine I am in. “Go on, I won’t leave you twisting in the wind, Johnny.” I scrunch my nose at the name, scoffing. “Oh that was the man who just, um, bit it… I figure the name’s too nice to let die.” I shrug, I don’t care what this stranger calls me anyway. It isn’t like I have a name.

Shouldn’t I have a name?

Why can’t I remember anything before I was in this bathysphere?

Nevermind, movement is more important. I wouldn’t want that crazy monster of a woman to find me before I find her. I step out of the bobbing bathysphere and onto the stone steps descending from where it’s parked. The room is cavernous, empty, surrounded by glass that reminds you of your isolation and mortality with water just beyond, and a stony floor, which has another one of those age-dirtied red running carpets leading the way. A venomous giggle echoes from somewhere I can’t see, around a bend and maybe up some stairs.

The man on the radio, Richard Brook, tells me “We’re going to need to draw her out of hiding, but you have to trust me.” I’m dubious, but this man seems to be the only sane person around and his voice is sweet anyway. Most people with sweet voices are actually consistent with that description.

Aren’t they?

Shouldn’t I not trust this Richard Brook?

Nevermind, safety is more important. I follow the red carpet, since it’s the only actual direction to go anyway, all of my path so far has felt pretty laid out for me. But I don’t really care about how much free will I have, and that’s almost more disconcerting than the changing scenery around me.

Signs litter the floor, protest signs. They say “Mycroft Doesn’t Own Us!” and “Rapture Has Fallen!” and “The East Wind Takes the Great Chain!” Lights flicker intermittently before falling entirely dead, luggage and blood clutter the floor, the place is-- obviously-- deserted.

Except for that creepy woman who whispers “I’ll wrap you in a sheet…”

“Just a little more, Johnny.” I step in front of a small doorway, it seems to open upward and is stuck half-closed by debris. The ‘ _it_ ’ is in between me and the door. I’m prepared to fight my way through that hag, because frankly that seems the familiar course of action.

Wouldn’t that get me killed?

Why do I feel like I’ve lived my whole life to fight this creepy thing?

Nevermind, the fight is more important. I square my shoulders but see a bright green spotlight illuminate my foe and she is riddled with bullets even as she tries in vain to climb a wall. “How do you like that, sister?!” Richard Brook cries triumphantly. The little turret-bots he appears to be controlling fade into the shadows and fly away.

I take a few wary steps forward to the stuck door. “Would you kindly find a crowbar or something?” Brook asks, I search the ground as he continues. “Bloody splicers sealed Johnny in before they-... Goddamn splicers.” Apparently that crazy lady wasn’t the only sorry-excuse-for-past-human that Rapture had to offer. I find a wrench on the edge of the pool of light one dim bulb allows.

The rubble in the doorway gives easily under the solid weight of the wrench and my unexpected but entirely known upper body strength. The door drops shut before opening up with the audible sound of damaged gears turning. A stairway awaits me, with a burning couch perched at the top. Now I’m not claiming to be anything close to intelligent, but I’m pretty sure couches don’t spontaneously combust, and especially not in underwater cities. I dodge just before it tumbles down the stairs and then rush the man behind it. Beating his crowbar with my wrench is easy, especially because this ‘splicer’ is a little too on the crazy side to do more than swing wildly and hope he hits. He doesn’t. I crack his skull like an egg, loot his corpse for anything useful, and proceed to inspect the room.

There’s the glass walls and ceiling that seem to be the style of Rapture (and why not show off the underwater aspect of your underwater city at any chance you get? It’s certainly pretty), and a metal door on one wall. Through the glass I can see a wholly-glass hallway beyond the door, but the sensor panel isn’t working, so no option there. Instead I turn to see a staircase in the crumbling room and follow that. An advertisement blares through the speakers of a pink vending machine, it speaks in the voice of the two girls statued on either side.

“ _My daddy's SMARTER than Einstein, STRONGER than Hercules and lights a fire with a SNAP of his fingers. Are you as good as my daddy, Mister? Not if you don't visit the Gatherer's Garden, you aren't! Smart daddies get spliced, at th_ e Gardens!”

There is a syringe there, waiting for me in the open slot of the ‘Gatherer’s Garden’, all better judgement tells me that this is a bad idea for multiple reasons, that someone was going to yell at me for this.

Who knows who used this syringe before me?

Should I really be ‘splicing’ when the crazed denizens of this watery dystopia are called ‘splicers’?

Nevermind, progress is more important. I stick the needle into my arm and wince when the whole limb goes tingly. Then I feel something like pins and needles, and I groan just a little. My radio buzzes to life as the pain ramps up to struck-by-lightning, and I can see my veins being electrocuted through the skin and I _scream_.

“Steady now!” Richard Brook calls desperately from the speaker in my belt loop. “Your genetic code is being rewritten– just hold on and everything will be fine!” And for the sake of not vomiting I grab at the railing of the staircase with white knuckles, but I’m shaking so even when I try to slide to a sit I fall over the edge and land unconscious on the floor below.

My consciousness flickers like the lights.

On.

“This little fish looks like he just got his cherry popped!” A sick, slimy voice. I would move away if I could. I try and then--

Off.

On.

A roar of thunder, or the groan of something massive and metal.

“Hear that?” A smaller voice, sounds like a centipede with less legs. “Let’s bug.”

The slimy one screams after the receding figure. “WEAK! You’re a _weak_ chopper!”

Footsteps stop in justification. “This little fish ain’t worth toeing it with no Big Daddy.” The centipede mutters.

The slimy one taps his pipe on the ground. “Yellow. Always have been.” He grumbles. “You’re no better off with the metal daddy, little fish. See you floating on the briney…” Both sets of feet leave me and the way they ran scared makes me want to get up and leave too, but trying to raise my head again is just--

Off.

On.

The footsteps are huge this time. I open my eyes now. Something giant and metal-ish and mostly anthropomorphic looms. One hand is a drill and it’s face looks like a diver merged with the front of a submarine. I would be scared if I had the energy to be, but all I can think is ‘ _Please God, let me live’_ and then--

Off.

On.

“Look Mister Bubbles, an angel! I can see light coming from his belly…” The voice sounds like the ghost of a little girl, joyful and hollowed out. The echo across a canyon of drug-induced fervor. I crack my eyes and see a ghastly little girl, skin all grey and eyes glowing yellow. She wears a tattered little excuse for a dress and no shoes, her hair is done up in a ratty ponytail but so much of the hair is falling out that the styling has ceased any function it could have possessed. She is smiling at me. “Wait a minute, he’s still breathing.” She takes a few steps back, her smile falters before returning. “It’s alright, I know he’ll be an angel soon.” Both monsters leave in the same direction of the splicers from a minute ago.

Bloody hell am I glad to still be alive.

Off.

On.

Now I can rise, slowly albeit, without blacking out. My radio buzzes in and Richard Brook’s soft voice sounds like a smirk. “You alright there, Johnny-boy? First time plasmid’s a real kicker, but… there’s nothing quite like a fistful of lightning, is there?” I finally make my way to a stand and flex the hand that offended me with such pain. In my palm, lightning crackles.

This gives me cause for a grin, because there really isn’t anything like a fistful of lightning.

Is there?

Why does this remind me of a pair of icy blue eyes?

Nevermind, the door is more important. The door with the broken sensor panel is the only viable option of exit I’ve seen and after trying to electrocute the door a few times, I finally get it right and strike the fritzing panel on the side. The door snaps open and I waste no time debating the options before I follow the glassy tunnel beyond.

This is a mistake, but I only realize it when the tail end of a plane crashes through the glass walls and the hallway begins to flood. Knowing the way back holds no alternative routes, I wade through the torrents of water and dodge the streams beginning to spit through cracks in the glass and barely notice other hallways being decimated by similar debris outside before I make it to a working doorway (for once) and instantly put it between me and the water behind.

The room I find myself in now is worse lit than where I came from, with tiled floors and solid walls, as well as rooms branching on either side holding the usual Windows. There’s another door in front of me too, but it says ‘Airlock Active’ and won’t open when I approach. Debris and water cover the floor thickly; in the room on the right a leak of water falls slowly to a shallow pool, where a corpse looks on idly; in the room on the left there’s a glowing green chamber and a folded-over mattress and another splicer.

I sigh.

The splicer notices me, drags his claw-hands across the ground, throwing up sparks. I zap him with my lightning hand and club him with my wrench hand. He has a first aid kit and a blue bottle labeled ‘Eve Hypo’ that I take from his corpse. He won’t be using them anyway.

Only now does the door open-- to reveal another splicer no less. He has a crowbar and screams “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone!” as he attempts to maul me to death. The crowbar strikes my arm, but I still bludgeon his head before he can do anything further.

Behind him is stairs, which I ascend to a room with another golden, chiseled man hanging in a corner behind an abandoned desk. The ground rumbles beneath me as several pieces of something are dislodged from the ceiling and fall before me. One of which is a man, who is on fire and trying to attack me. I shock him to death in moments. He drops another ‘Eve Hypo’, and I take it before exploring the volatile room. There are overgrown planters of ferns that give everything a jungled look and a few locked off areas with displays lined up like a souvenir shop. One of the rooms I can enter holds elevators and-- without any real objective except ‘move’ I step inside one that is suspiciously lit up.

Why am I suspicious of this?

Why don’t I care about where I’m going?

Nevermind, the headache is more important. I see just a few brief flashes: tea, a coat billowing, a beer bottle crashing against a wall. Then it’s all gone as soon as it came and I’m back in the elevator feeling more than a bit confused. 


	3. III

My radio buzzes fitfully to life. Brook’s sweet voice chimes through with the timbre of emotion making it smaller than before. “Listen -- I've got a family.” He says, breaking with helplessness I can hear even through the static. “I need to get them out of here. But the Splicers have cut me off from them. If you can reach them in Neptune's Bounty, then maybe, just maybe…” He gives me a weak, mirthless laugh. “I know you must feel like the unluckiest man in the world right now, but you're the only hope I'll ever see my brother and husband again.” A deep sigh, and then a more firm “Go to Neptune's Bounty-- find my family…” And just when I think this stranger has shown me the true depths of his emotion, he adds “Please.” Just under a whisper and I feel my heart leave me and go to him for comfort. I know now that I have to save this man and get him to safety.

So. Next stop: Neptune’s Bounty.

It’s just through the Medical Pavilion, isn’t it?

Why do I know where that is?

No. No. No more questions, they’re distracting and right now I’m a soldier on a mission to save civilians from a warzone.

Actually I’m not a soldier, I’m… Someone. Certainly I’m someone. Goddammit, I wish I knew who! Maybe I was a soldier before, maybe that’s why all this comes so naturally. The thrill of being chased, the adrenaline pumping through my veins, just me against the world.

I step out of the elevator to find a still very-well-outlined trail for me to follow, and of course there is a splicer waiting just around the corner.

I raise the wrench to dash in with no holds barred, but her shadow, her echo, catches my attention. She sings a low, dissonant tune and I can tell by the silhouette she’s bending over a stroller, singing to it.

“When you’re daddy’s in the ground, momma’s gonna sell you by the pound. When your mommy’s up and gone, you’re gonna be the lonely one. When you are the lonely one, no one will be there to sing this song.” Her shredded vocal chords make the morbid song even stranger and I can’t help but feel someone erratic enough to sing that to a child shouldn’t have charge of one in the first place. The song has stopped, but the echo continues as the shadow begins to twitch. “Hush now,” it soothes hoarsely, “Mommy’s gone… and daddy too…” whatever child this woman has custody of doesn’t need soothing, it hasn’t whined even a little, and if it did that is not the way to do it. But hey, what do I know? It’s not like I’ve ever had kids, probably. “Wait.” The mommy-splicer interrupts herself. “This is happening before and not… why aren’t you here? Why is it today and not when you were warm and sweet?” Now I am concerned, genuinely, because it is beginning to dawn on me that this woman is not talking to a baby. “Why can’t mommy just hold you and-- I’m bleeding. Mommy’s bleeding!” Now the shushing mother’s tone grows high-pitched and catatonic. “ _Where am I!? This is all wrong!”_ And she comes barreling around the corner, nose streaming blood and face all distorted by tumors and growths. All it takes to kill her is a single wrench-blow to the head before I can relieve her of some cash and a pep bar. Going to the stroller the woman had been standing at-- because I feel an intrinsic need to ensure that she was not actually talking to some poor child-- I find it empty of anything living. It’s occupant is a revolver. I pocket the weapon before continuing morosely through the corridor.

As if sensing my unease, Richard Brook comes back in through the radio, voice more composed than before. “Plasmids changed everything.” he explains solemnly. “They destroyed our bodies, our minds. We couldn’t handle it. Best friends butchering one another, babies strangled in cribs.” I wince inwardly at that, because I know somewhere up in my noggin that that is what happened to mommy-splicer. “The whole city went to hell.” Then the static punctuates his withdrawal back to his hidey-hole just outside of Neptune’s Bounty.

I walk in silence through the doorway just ahead. Beyond is what once was a hub of socialites but is now a disorienting mess of debris and bloodshed. The New Year’s poster marked for 1959 shows a man in a mask with chilling relation to my spliced up companions-- and I feel this was one party I’d have missed. The neon reading out with the same congratulatory message hangs awkward and lopsided and several meters lower than intended, probably used at one point or another as a climbing foothold for anyone leaping from the demolished balcony edge to the still-spinning Rapturian globe intimidating the dance floor below. The set of stairs that one is supposed to use for things like going downstairs has been left helplessly disused and thus in fairly good condition, if you’re okay with some wet feet. All the decor was once subtle and warm, but when setting up party decorations it’s rare to have them be so permanent, so the colors have turned to drab and dull, some dank and dust settled in at the corners.

Voices grind below, maybe they were high-pitched once, or maybe people going through constant drug overdoses are liable to have strained vocal chords. I don’t think so, but how should I know? I’m no doctor. Probably.

I’m probably not a soldier either, but I sure can move like one. I am silent down the stairs and I club the male splicer outside the door, just as he’s bitching about whoever is inside the locked door owing him ADAM. He falls like a downed glass of alcohol, which the female inside the door hears and uses as an excuse to emerge worriedly from her vaguely-safe-house.

“CHARLIE!” She squeals. This is the one with the streaky voice and I make no mistake in her quick dispatch.

Next up: exploring the vaguely-safe-house. It’s the carcass of a kitchen, and the only real materials found, other than the EVE hypo from the lady’s corpse, is five dollars and a first aid kit. Basically a waste of time, although God knows the only things that don’t feel like a waste of somehow-precious time right now is finding Neptune’s Bounty and reuniting Richard Brook with his family.

Back on the dancefloor, the flooded indent holding the globe now also holds two splicers, drunkenly stumbling.

“If you catch a splicer in the water, hit them with your electro-bolt, Johnny-boy.” Brook nearly sighs into the radio. He sounds so… lost, now that his only job is helping me get to him and waiting like a damsel in distress. I know I’d hate that bit.

The anthropomorphic monsters in the knee-deep puddle fry to death. Very easy. I make a note to use that more often.   
Unfortunately, I’m not in Rapture for dancing, and there’s nowhere to go from downstairs. I head back up the stairs and head for the bathrooms instead. Some conditioned principle of modesty forces me into the room labeled “Gents” and away from the one labeled “Ladies”.

The inside is exactly as well-kept as one would expect in a drug-addicted hell-hole. Half the sinks and two toilets are entirely gone. Mirrors smashed. The handicapped stall has been entirely demolished in the hopes of making a convenient spot to enter the next room. Maybe not convenient for one trying to run a successful dance floor and restaurant, but very convenient for one trying to leave said dance floor and restaurant.

My luck turns up when there is only one set path ahead of me, but flips when Brook’s voice comes in with new, fear-filled intensity through the speaker of my radio. “Would you kindly lower that weapon?” He requests politely.

And I think: Oh, of course, what was I doing, waving it around like that, in the first place?

I step onto the catwalk over the theater below me and see a little girl, a child, kneeling next to a corpse. I can’t tell whether it’s scarier that there is a child among the monsters here or that the tiny thing is sticking a bloated dead body with a syringe.

“You think that’s a child down there?” Brook cuts in abruptly, he sounds disgusted. “Don’t be fooled; she’s a Little Sister now.” He spits, and I can hear the contempt in his voice, it might not be aimed at the girl-- the thing-- below  me, now drinking from the graduated end of the syringe through a special bottle-top. Brook’s tone goes south, into bitter sadness. “Somebody” and I guessed that he meant a very particular somebody, “went and turned a sweet baby girl into a monster. Whatever you thought about right and wrong on the surface, well that just doesn’t count for much here in Rapture.” A pause, then he went to a more didactic tone, and I had to shake my head to clear the protest from it. “Those Little Sisters, they carry ADAM, that’s the genetic material that keeps the wheels of Rapture turning. Everybody wants it. Everybody _needs_ it.” I feel the dilapidated carpet of Rapture’s theme under my feet again and hurry down the stairs that are immediately before me.

There’s a window at the bottom of the landing, likely where one would watch a play from, and I can see a man enter through the curtains. I feel my stomach drop-- exactly like it would if this was a play and not some demented man coming to kill some demented child. It’s only when I get close enough to try and warn the kid when I see what she looks like: grey skin, glowing yellow eyes, a frankly disgustingly blood-and-grit-covered frock, and a ponytail more in shambles than my apparent logical reasoning capabilities. She looked familiar, but there was no real way for that to be possible.

I want to scream for this girl, but she spots the assailant and beats me to the punch. Almost immediately a big pile of mildewy metal with a porthole barrels out from behind the curtain and the man is down before he can raise his gun. I’d sigh in relief if it was any relief to have one threat replaced by another.

Except the Little Sister takes his hand in hers (which is a hyperbole, really, her whole hand can barely wrap around his finger) and skips away with a smile. Unperturbed.

“That’s the Big Daddy.” Brook chimes in, still with a somberly informative tone. “She gathers ADAM, he keeps her safe.”

Well at least one of us is safe.

I break the lock on a gate to my left, and follow some of Rapture’s more direct and window-laden paths through a ragtag gathering of splicers and one unfortunate Big Daddy corpse to a sign reading Neptune’s Bounty $48 and two pep bars richer. A chain-linked gate shuts in my face and I barely dodge a flamethrower to the solarplexus. And, of course, a dozen splicers suddenly want to be my suicide buddy and they all come flying down a set of stairs waving guns and crowbars.

The soothing voice of Richard Brook comes to me filled with static and background information I wish I’d known earlier while I fight.

“It’s Mycroft! Goddamned Mycroft Holmes! He found us, or you at least. Shit! He’s cut off access to Neptune-- wait, there’s another way! Head to Medical, go! What are you waiting for? Hurry!”

I follow instructions, because for any fighting prowess I did or did not possess I was hopelessly outmatched.

I catch a break in the access to the Medical Pavilion being open and across the hall. But who cares for anything being easy? The bulkhead door shuts before my very eyes and, while Brook promises to try and override it from his position, the screen in the corner fuzzes from black to a black-and-white of one Mycroft Holmes, with hands still untouched by more than a bureaucratic papercut and suit still pressed. The picture was, of course, taken before the pandemonium.

“So tell me, friend, which one of those _mongrels_ sent you?” He spits through the loudspeaker. “The KGB wolf? The CIA jackal? Hm? Well, let me clear the waters: Rapture isn’t some sunken ship for you to plunder. And Mycroft Holmes is no giddy socialite, I won’t be slapped around by government muscle. And with that: farewell, or dasvidaniya. Whichever you prefer.” His screen snaps out of existence and the white noise now consists of the spliced-up screams of maniacs attacking the separating glass between me and them. Oh, and Brook telling me “I got it! Get out of there!” and when the glass cracks and I rush towards the bulkhead he nearly screams “Get out now!”

I open the bulkhead post-haste, without a splicer able to make it with me, thankfully.

When the bulkhead opens to the Medical Pavilion without a flood warning, Brook comes back in, bitterly, on my radio. “Now you’ve met Mycroft Holmes, the bloody king of Rapture.” He scoffs before telling me “Get to Emergency Access”

So I do, following the angular halls of Rapture and attempting to ignore the patronizing advertisements telling me of Dr. Jeff Hope’s spectacular medical prowess and saying that splicer issues were under control. All of it, so backwards.

It takes a long while-- who knows how long days really are?-- and six splicers before I reach Medical Access.


	4. IV

At Medical Access I’m supposed to find a way into Neptune’s Bounty, Richard Brook tells me, but he conveniently forgets exact instructions, so I flounder a bit longer. This is all feeling very repetitive and honestly I don’t want to keep going, but he just says “would you kindly?” and I melt, I can’t stop myself from helping him.

As I wander through one of the glass tunnels interconnected between virtually every building in this sunken city, I walk a little slower to appreciate the scenery. A school of fluorescent red fish lazily amble by above me. Starfish cling to the tunnel walls. I can see a gorgeous panorama of this chunk of Rapture, with Plasmid advertisements and Surgery propaganda. In the tunnel several yards away, running adjacent to mine, I see _them_. Him: a giant metal man with a drill for a hand. Her: a tiny grey girl cradling a needle. The same pair I saw earlier, but different. This Sister’s dress is green, her hair rust-colored, and the Daddy’s suit is more bullet-riddled and rusting.

I keep watching and walking. They are skipping, oblivious-- or she is, while he walks at a snail’s pace to compensate for her tiny legs.

I don’t want to encounter them if I don’t have to.

I don’t want to kill them.

Outside of what looks to be an emergency room, I finish off two splicers with a shock of electricity to the water they’re in and head back out to another glass hallway that aren’t growing any less glamorous despite the frequency. It gets a little less glamorous when the tunnel ruptures at the end, though.

“Sounds like another tunnel collapse.” Richard Brook mutters into the radio, then, louder, he laughs. “Welcome to Rapture, Johnny-boy, it’s the world’s fastest growing pile of junk.” I chuckle too, even though he can’t hear me. It seems polite.

Flashes of sepia-toned somethings. A cab driver, a gunshot, laughing somewhere we shouldn’t be.

Staggering slightly, and trying desperately to shake off the question of who ‘we’ is, I take a detour through a door on my left. Inside is a room with black-and-white tiled floors and a more extensive collapse on the other side of the room, as well as an archway branching to a larger, less collapsed room. Screams of a child are coming from there. I raise my wrench and approach cautiously.

The Big Daddy comes flying through the archway and lands, dead, barely three feet in front of me. He’s on fire and leaking blood and it occurs to me that machines don’t bleed. It also occurs to me that there is some joke there that I’m just missing, but that’s hardly important now.

I peek through the offending archway to see the green-dressed Little Sister from earlier. Richard Brook calls through my radio with a voice like he’s salivating. “It’s a little one!” He cooes. “Now’s your chance to get some ADAM.”

I step into the room. A splicer looms over the child on what looks like a dancefloor. He gets shot in the head, but shockingly not by me. My head snaps to the source of the gunshot.

In one of three balconies nearly fifteen feet above the floor, a man holds a gun towards my head. His frame is tall, but thinner than a needle, he might weigh ninety-five pounds, and he’s wrapped in long, wooly navy coat. Eyes are on fire with something unplaceable but as light as ice. Hair settles in curls around his ears. Lips are thin, and drawn thinner in concentration as he says “Stay away from her or it’s you who’ll be shot next.”

I don’t have time to speak before Brook talks through my radio. “Easy now, Holmes, he’s just looking for a little bit of ADAM. Just enough to get by.” I’m not a telephone. I’m not a telephone. I’m not a telephone.

“I’ll not have him hurt the little ones.” The man, apparently ‘Holmes,’ says flatly. I start to wonder what, exactly, I would have to do to get ADAM from this girl. Because it’s sounding a lot like I’d have to kill her, and that is not what I’m here for. Nevermind the fact that I don’t know what I _am_ here for.

“It’s okay, Johnny-boy.” Richard Brook soothes me, as if he’d read my thoughts. “That’s not a child, not anymore. Mr. Holmes saw to that!” Slowly, dubiously, basically unwillingly, I take a few steps towards the child, who begins to scamper away on hands and knees because she’s so scared she can’t stand.

Mr. Holmes-- Isn’t Mycroft Holmes the bastard who runs this place?-- exclaims “Don’t hurt her.” I slow down even further. “ _Please_.” I stop.

A scoff comes from my hip-height radio. “Oh that’s a pretty sermon coming from the psychopath who created these creatures in the first place.”

By what seems a force of habit, Mr. Holmes corrects Brook: “I’m not a psychopath. I’m a high-functioning sociopath, do your research, Mr. Brook.”

The amendment goes unnoticed by the irate man on the short-wave. “You took fine little girls and turned ‘em into _that_ , didn’t you? Listen, Johnny: you won’t survive without the ADAM those… things… are carrying. Are you prepared to trade your life-- and the lives of my brother, my husband, for his little Frankensteins?”

Just as I’m thinking that the guilt will live with me forever, and I’ll try to make it quick, the man behind me gets my attention once more. “Here! There is another way. Use this,” he passes me a bottle, and looks pleased when I catch it, “free them from their torment. I’ll make it worth your while.” The bottle has an ominous red glow, but what doesn’t when you’re at the bottom of the ocean? I drink it quickly and feel the tingle of a plasmid enter my bloodstream.

The Little Sister has pressed herself, shaking, to a luggage box and I reach out one hand gingerly. She protests but I manage to put my palm to her forehead and she collapses under a harsh glow of light. Just as I’m wondering if I did it wrong and have accidentally killed a small child, the light leaves with a flash and before me sits a perfectly healthy, if somewhat pale and emaciated, young girl of maybe seven or eight.

She looks at her hands before grinning wildly, her eyes a match to the green on her dress and now glowing with joy instead of drugs. “Thank you, mister!” She exclaims before sprinting across the room and wiggling into a golden hole in the wall.

The man on the balcony sighs with relief, Richard Brook scoffs into the radio.

“I’ll start by telling you that man is a fraud.” Mr. Holmes says without emotion. “He’s manipulating you so he can ultimately take over this godforsaken dump and then throw you to the sharks. His real name is Jim Moriarty.”

I scoff, almost in unison with my radio. “Really, Sherlock?” Not Mycroft the dictator. Maybe a relative, not a lot of physical similarity though. “You couldn’t prove that, even if it was true.”

Now a smirk comes to the one on the balcony, he’s lowered his gun. “Yes I could., or in this case: can. Now would you like to admit it yourself or shall I start deducing?” There is no doubt, no emotion, nothing but calculation in his baritone voice. It’s miles from what I’d certainly heard when he’d pleaded for the life of that little girl.

A pause sits within the radio for so long I wonder if it has malfunctioned. No, though, I’m not so lucky. “Would you kindly ignore the crazy Mr. Holmes and find my family? I think we’ve wasted enough time here.” At first I don’t want to move, but then I see: yes. We have wasted much too long here, dallying with sociopathic scientists and ghoulish girls. It’s time to continue with my mission.

A look of pity evanescently brushes over Sherlock Holmes’s face. That brings up more stings of heart-rending pictures. In a traincar with a ticking clock, a man lying shot on the steps of his own home, someone leaving a wedding early. I stumble out of the room and continue my quest towards Neptune’s Bounty.

Before I’ve gotten far, Richard Brook tells me “If you come across another of those pink Gatherer’s Garden machines, go ahead and get yourself another plasmid. If you can afford it of course. Saving Little Sisters doesn’t get you nearly as much ADAM, but that’s your prerogative..” He cuts out as a new sound fills my ears.

There’s a song playing, recorded voices of little girls play fuzzily. I follow the noise to-- as luck would have it-- a bright pink, rusting vending machine with a metallic Little Sister on either side. The options offered are almost overwhelming, but I eventually go for buying the Incinerate plasmid. It seems useful in a city of frigid water leaking from every possible seam.

This is all well and fine, until I proceed to find another Big Daddy and Little Sister pairing not ten minutes later.

There is an implicit choice here: I can ignore this, leave things as they are, and pretend I never saw anything, I could kill the both of them like the animals they are probably meant to be treated as, or I could save the Little Sister the way I’d done before. This would have been an easy choice except for the part where getting to _her_ meant most probably killing _him_. Which frankly sounded like a pain in the ass.

But I’d like to think I’m a good guy, so here goes nothing.

I steal a shotgun from a corpse and fire all four rounds into the metal giant’s face. Now blood leaks chillingly from one small porthole and he screams in pain before running at me, drill raised. Just before impact, I glide to the left and try out my new Incinerate plasmid on him. The fabric on his body lights up and some of the metal warps under the heat. He swings wildly at me, blinded by pain and rage. The Little Sister squeals behind him, and sobs.

I try not to feel guilt.

That bit gets easier when the Big Daddy whips out a machine gun and fires away, leaving me with milliseconds to dive behind a counter and wait until he has to reload. Then I realize my opportunity, peek up above the countertop, shoot him with a bolt of electricity, and unload a whole clip from my pistol into a soft spot in his armor. More blood falls out, but finally he groans pitifully and falls to the ground.

The Little Sister sprints to his side, seemingly not caring about my personage or cavalry, and clings to him as her crying wracks her tiny frame. “Mr. Bubbles, please wake up…” She pleaded.

The guilt was back. In order to try and fulfill some sort of karma, I approached her carefully. She tried to kick at me, bite, scratch, but I’m honestly about four times her size, even as short as I am, so she isn’t hard to lift and I press my palm almost desperately to her forehead. A flash of hot white light and I set her down quickly.

Dress: still a dusty purple and covered in blood and grime. Hair: still ratty and barely contained by a white scrunchy. Body: still thin as a rail and dirty to discoloration, but not grey anymore. Eyes: bright without an ominous glow as she looks all around her in bewilderment. Voice: shy when she thanks me and scampers away on bare feet.

I feel a little better about killing the Big Daddy now, despite the mournful look the ex-Little Sister casts him as she disappears into a hidey-hole in the wall. The second is short though, then I feel a sharp pain in my neck and the world goes black.

 

“Wake up, would you kindly?” I snap my eyes open.

“Sit, would you kindly?” I raise myself to sit up, opening my eyes to observe the world around me.

“Stand, would you kindly?” I am suddenly on my feet. I look around to see I’m in a cleanly, if anything overly-posh office. I had been sleeping on the couch.

Resting coolly in the chair across from me is a dark figure reading a yellowed newspaper. “At ease.” I let out a breath I hadn’t been holding, not consciously anyway. Relaxing back into the couch, I recognize the man across from me as one Mycroft Holmes. Rapture’s seemingly totalitarian, kakistocratic pioneer-leader. He pours me tea, of all the things he could do. “‘Would you kindly’… hmph.” He says in a measuredly contemptual tone. “Tell me, what separates a man from a slave, hm?” He requests politely, patronizingly. “Money? Power? No.” Without any amount of extra force, Mycroft sets the teapot back down, but it seems to shake the table. “A man _chooses_. A slave _obeys_.”

Dubiously, I take the tea proffered to me. “You have no memories, do you? Nothing of, say, a plane crash?” Narrowing my eyes, and really wishing the bastard would get to the point, I shake my head. “Let me be clear,” Mycroft hisses, menace slicing through his voice, “I want to know why you think you’re here.”

“I’m not sure I understand.” I reply, unintimidated.

A condescending smirk, “Of course you don’t. You weren’t made to understand, just to do.” I’m getting very close to throttling this son of a bitch, but he finally puts down his own tea. “‘Would you kindly”… Powerful phrase, isn’t it? Familiar phrase, perhaps?”

Is it? It is. Where have I heard that?

Oh.

_Oh._

Richard Brook. As in Richard “Would you kindly pick up a radio _/_ find a crowbar _/_ lower your weapon _/_ ignore Sherlock Holmes _/_ etc.?” Brook. Things are starting to feel sideways.

“Stand, would you kindly?” I stand up. “Run, would you kindly?” I run, and I feel sick for it because this is certainly not what I want to be doing right now. “Stop.” I stop. Turning away from me, Mycroft calls “Anthea, your assistance is requested.” A pretty woman enters, clipboard in hand. Back to holding my attention, Mycroft hands me my wrench, looking disgusted at the feel of it between his fingers. “Would you kindly kill Ms. Anthea, here?” He requests flatly.

My mind screams in protest, but my hand grabs the wrench. Anthea only looks slightly displeased with this, casting an annoyed glance to Mycroft.

When I begin to step towards her, I also begin to cry, to scream. “Stop, please, for God’s sake! Don’t make me kill her!” But I raise the wrench above my head and slam it downwards without ability for remorse.

“Stop!” Mycroft finally releases me. The wrench is only six inches from Anthea’s hair, she has cowed slightly but rights herself when I drop my arm and the wrench to my side. I take a shaking breath.

Waving Anthea away with a flick of the wrist, Mycroft smiles, slimily. “Consider this before continuing any work with that Richard Brook fellow. My brother was right about him: he is Jim Moriarty.”

Before I can protest, a gag is brought around my mouth and a bag is brought over my head. I’m pulled from the room, with the final words I hear being “No one knows of this conversation, yet. Use that wisely.”


	5. V

When the footsteps retreat and I take the bag and gag off, I am exactly two steps from where I was before I was abducted, I have also had a little while to develop a plan. It requires a Little Sister. From what I’ve seen though, there aren’t a lot of them in the Medical Pavilion, so I head back to Emergency Access and, with some skilled hacking that it takes several tries to accomplish, hack open a bathysphere to Neptune’s Bounty.

“You made it!” Richard Brook exclaims, with hope shining so close to real in his voice. “My family is in a submarine in the foundation of Fontaine Fisheries, head to the control deck first so you can unlock this damned cage and let me to them.” The fact that I plan to do none of that makes it a little hard to hear him say “Thank you, Johnny-boy. Thank you so much.” but the fact that he has been mind-controlling me pushes me past that.

In front of me a corpse is strung to a pillar, totally bloodied, with a gruesome message reading ‘smuggler’ scrawled below. Past him is a series of vending machines, a Big Daddy corpse slumped to the ground, blood long washed away by the water leaking a steady stream from the ceiling. He has a bazooka, which I take. Seems useful.

The room is halfway collapsed, I have to crawl over a fallen wall to get past it, another of Rapture’s iconic automatic sliding doors leading to a glassy hallway. This particular hallway is flooded, with dense schools of fish crowding any view. An ironic, fallen sign tries to argue that things are fine-- that there’s been 91 days since the last accident, and only 2 accidents last year besides, but based on the decor I’d say that’s not up-to-date.

Through the other end of the hallway I see, or more accurately _hear,_ exactly what I need: A Big Daddy’s thumping footsteps like a heartbeat on depressant drugs. He doesn’t notice me, and neither does the tyke on his heels. She giggles “I hear angels, Mr. B!” I pull out my newly acquired bazooka and load a grenade in before sneaking right up to the back of the Big Daddy. The grenade explodes right into his middle and I reload another before the lumbering giant can try and attack. He has barely lifted a rivet gun when I fire the other shot. He falls. She screams.

As quickly as I can I put a hand to her forehead. She doesn’t fight it, just sobs pitifully. The glow flashes and I set her down, where she wipes her tears and frowns meaningfully at the corpse I created before gently whispering “Thank you…” And she turns to skitter away.

“Wait! Please, wait!” The little girl stops, “I need your help.” Cautiously, she shuffles closer to me. Her blue eyes are suspicious, as they should be, and her thin face quivers at the sight of me-- and I must be a sight, I realize, covered in as much blood and dirt and gunpowder as I am. “I’m looking for a man, Sherlock Holmes.”

At this, her face lights up. “Oh! Papa! He lives at the other side of the vents. Do you know him, mister?” All previous shyness is gone, instead the little girl shakes her little brunette head of hair and waits for my answer.

With some confusion as to how to explain any of my situation, I relent to just saying “Yeah, he… um, he helped me before.”

Tiny hands clap excitedly. “Really!? I’ve never heard of Papa helping _anyone_ . You must be a really good friend. Come on, he’s this way!” She accepts my help into a golden vent in the wall and waits for me to climb up after her. These things really were intended for little girls though, so I have to army crawl very uncomfortably, and much slower.

She rambles on and on about Papa, and how he always has a sour face unless her or one of her sisters is very clever, but the grey ones rarely are. She tells me that the grey ones don’t come back often, and they always walk around with Mr. B. When I ask her though, she seems to have no memory of having literally just been part of that denomination. Instead she changes the topic, saying that her sisters were going to be so happy to meet one of Papa’s friends.

This drags on almost endlessly. My elbows ache and my shoulder hitches when she finally heads toward a light at the end of the non-metaphorical tunnel.

She slides out easily and I follow much more clumsily after her.

There is no way to avoid falling practically headfirst from the vent. I hear the scrape of a chair and some childish giggles.

Sherlock Holmes comes to stand above me. “You--…  You’re the slave.” He seems genuinely surprised at this.

Rolling into a sit, I correct him. “Apparently my name is ‘Johnny-boy.’”

“Unacceptable.” He mutters. Drawing more giggles from behind him.

“What? It’s my name!” I finally stand back up, and see the giggles emanate from a litter of about fifteen to twenty young girls.

He scoffs. “No, it’s not. What about John? It makes you sound less puerile.”

And I don’t even really care, because it isn’t really my name, who cares what people call me. Except: “How do you know it’s not my name?” I demand suddenly, hand going for my wrench.

Sherlock waves me off and goes to sit at a microscope. “The same way I know that Richard Brook is Jim Moriarty and the same way I know that you are under the influence of severe mental conditioning.”

I’m unsure whether I should bother asking how he knows either of those things. “Papa is John your friend?” The girl who led me here asks Sherlock.

He doesn’t respond.

“Papa.” She sings. “Papa, papa, papa!” Now the other ones start laughing, trying to shush themselves with hands over their mouths, but with little effect. “Papa!”

“Sherlock!” I finally cry, because I’m not sure if he’s okay at that point and I still need to use him.

Immediately, he looks up from the microscope and I nod to the mess of giggling child at his knees. “Yes?”

“Nevermind.” She hums, before skipping away to her sisters.

A long-suffering sigh and he returns to his work.

“It’s almost finished.” Sherlock mumbles, I almost miss it.

“Hm?”

“Lot 192, a replication of it. It’ll release the mental conditioning. Dr. Stapleton created it initially, the paranoid bat, in case Moriarty ever tried to use you against her. I got one of the girls to grab me a sample and I’m reverse-engineering enough to fully undo your… condition.” He says all of this without looking up from his microscope, almost to himself. Nodding, even though he can’t see it, I wander a few feet away.

The area is very obviously not intended for anything more than a storage area, with one office where Sherlock works and outside of it being filled with hodge-podge furniture. Weathered metal bunk-beds with dirty mattresses and blankets. Teddy bears, blocks, and other toys that had seen better days. Chairs from restaurants, or wheelchairs. No tables. No dishes. Cans of food on the floor next to chalk drawings.

This is not how children should live.

“You arrived earlier than expected, there must have been a significant loss on Mycroft’s side.” Sherlock says into the microscope.

Looking back to the thin man in the office, I ask “What does that mean?”

Another deep sigh. “You came here to get yourself cured. You only knew you needed to be cured thanks to my brother, Mycroft. Mycroft wouldn’t have told you anything unless it was easier for him to do so than to wait for you to discover it on your own. Thus, Mycroft must have needed you out of Moriarty’s toolbox. So Moriarty must have a one-up on him. Therefore, there must have been a significant loss on Mycroft’s side of the bloody stupid civil war.”

“I didn’t know there was a civil war…” I murmured.

“What did you think was going on? A man with easy access to hacked turret-bots and surveillance couldn’t get through a gate so he could escape with his family in the one working submarine in the whole of this side of Rapture?” He scoffed at me. “Imbecile.” I almost want to rant at him, because let’s be honest that was about as rude as it gets, but he says. “Oh, don’t take it like that, almost everyone is.” And he scoots away from the microscope to another adjacent desk that is a mess of papers and bottles and petri dishes.

Then I step away and he looks up, face grimacing into confusion and slight disappointment. “Where are you going?” He demands, voice more peremptory than his face.

“Out.” I reply tersely. “I need some air.”

Then I walk brusquely out of his office, up the stairs near the ex-Little Sisters.


	6. VI

The little sisters all look at me, worriedly.

“Did you and Papa fight?” One asks.

“Are you coming back?” Another requests.

“Don’t leave!” A third pleads.

“Papa will come around.” One coaxes.

“Promise!” Yet a fifth cries.

“He just gets in moods.” A final one explains.

I grin, because they’re all so sweet, and kneel next to them. “I’ll be back, just going for a walk.” They wave solemnly, looking dubious. It feels like ages since I’ve had someone want me to come back home to them. Maybe I’ve never had that. Who knows? Certainly not me.

More rapid flashing images: violin strings at three in the morning saving me from a bomb in my head, a grey apartment after the fall with nightmares painted on the walls, shooing someone out the front door because he really should know better than to come in without knocking and now I’m embarrassed as hell, a sweet smile giving me biscuits and saying it’ll never happen again while knowing full well that’s a lie.

These leave me dizzy, I have to hold onto a bullet-riddled support column for at least two minutes before I can keep walking. I’m not feeling so well though, so I’m thinking I should turn around soon when my radio crackles to life.

“So you’ve found your way to the Holmes brothers.” A voice that is distinctly Jim Moriarty, meaning it is distinctly _not_ Richard Brook, chimes in. “I guess I really shouldn’t have counted on you being so obedient, but you were like a cocker spaniel! It was almost cute, if you weren’t so _dull_.” He bites. His voice is thinner, more edged than before. “Thank you so very much for leaving that safe house, the tracking I have in this radio doesn’t really work in there.” I should be thinking of a plan. All my brain can manage is “shit shit shit.” Moriarty continues, “Oh, don’t bother throwing it away, I already know where you are, and where Sherlock and those little things are. Really it’s like Christmas, thank you _so, so_ much.” I feel a chill up my spine because it’s occuring to me that this man might be insane. “So, Johnny-boy, I’m going to have you help me with one last thing, because no matter how much I love little Sherlock he’s gotten in my way and that won’t do.” If I were in a position to do so, I would love to say some choice words to this man, but no such luck. And if there was some way to get to him, to kill him, before he could do anything more to hurt anyone, I wouldn’t rest until I got there, but no luck there either.

“Would~ You~ Ki~ndly~?” Moriarty sang through the static. “Johnny would you kindly put on the vest I’m going to have a friend drop off?” Moments later the claws of a splicer are heard above me and a vest of semtex falls to the ground. I put on the vest, but not without struggling as much as possible. It does nothing, I am entirely subject to his whims. “Now, there’s a box, on the wall, just in the corner, next to that storage crate. Go open that box and shoot it.” I do as I’m told, desperately struggling mentally, trying everything from dropping my gun and kicking it away to intentionally misfiring the gun into the ceiling. I don’t need to be a genius to know that box was jamming the radio inside the safehouse.

“Now, would you kindly go back to the safehouse?” Moriarty’s voice makes me sick. I’m going to be sick. He’s going to make me kill a room full of children.

Numbly, because I can't give him the pleasure of making me cry or tremble or even flinch, I retrace my steps down the path to the safe house. The little girls have settled down, reading a story on the floor by one bunk bed. Sherlock is still cooped up in his office. He studies one petri dish with fixed ignorance.

“Now, Johnny-boy, go into his office. I'd like a quick chat before you all go boom.”

Swallowing thickly, I do as I'm told. I can't help it. My body follows a different brain now.

I knock on the door, mostly to exercise the little free-will I can. Now alerted to my presence, all the little girls reading turn to me and smile emphatically. They keep reading though, bless their souls. They don’t seem to find anything strange about my new vest. I want to tell them to leave but I’ve been told to do something else and I can’t find it in me to open my mouth before stepping into the office where Sherlock Holmes finally looks up with eyes made of clear river water. I see first the hope of a man forgiven, then the fear of a man left vulnerable.

Looking so hurt that I feel hurt, and trust me I really do hurt at the moment, Sherlock starts “John--?”

“Bet you never saw this coming!” Jim Moriarty cuts in. “How’s it going, Mr. Holmes the younger? Not too well from what I understand, I mean you have a man covered in enough explosives to put your whole crew in the deep standing in your office. P.S.: _I own him_.” He doesn’t sing that, he growls it. I swear my frayed nerves can’t keep this up. I’m almost glad Moriarty isn’t talking to me. I’m just a telephone, just a telephone, just a telephone. “That’s not really a shock to you, I know, but it feels so nice to say it out loud! I mean I do technically share the rights to his existence with you and Mrs. Stapleton, but he’s all mine for now.” Giving Sherlock a sharp look that feels ridiculously familiar for a relationship that started less than 48 hours ago, he returns it with a stoic set of impassive features.

“Oh, god, I’m getting sidetracked,” Jim catches up with himself, “I wanted to ask you something first. Sherlock what do you know of the tear in the Silverfish Diner? Don’t say nothing because I know you wouldn’t just happen to pick the storage basement of any old district. You’re not fifteen minutes a walk from the Silverfish, tell me what you know.”

I can hear the girls finishing their story in the other room and I physically hold back the tears because _I cannot let myself show weakness_.

Moriarty waits for a response.

All we hear from Sherlock is “John, are you oka--?”

“Oh shut up about the dog!” Moriarty snaps suddenly, with such viciousness that it’s a little surprising. “It’s a means to an end, you knew that when you planned its creation! It’s just a slave made to sleepwalk through life until we have use of it. When you tell me about that tear you’ll have run out of use, and that thing holding the radio will blow you both up and then it will have run out of usefulness too. It’s not a human, stop caring about it!” I barely hear the words over the roar of my heartbeat in my ears.

Slowly, silently, with eyes glowing white-hot, Sherlock moves to the counter behind him, reaching blindly for a vial of something glowing a sick yellow. “I don’t know anything about a ‘tear’.” He scoffs nonchalantly.

He holds out the bottle of science to me, indicating with a head tilt that I should drink it.

“Final answer?” Moriarty sings as I pull the cap off.

“Final answer.” Sherlock echoes solidly.


	7. VII

I down the bottle as fast as I can. It makes my phalanges tingle and my heartbeat pick up.

“Johnny-boy, would you kindly shoot the semtex vest you’re wearing?”

The gun trembles in my hands, I raise it. I want to put it down so badly, to throw it away, to never touch it again. I clench my eyes shut. The gun flies from my hands to the ground with the clack of metal on metal.

“Sherlock Holmes you dirty boy.” Moriarty scolds playfully from the radio. “If my pet won’t finish the job, then I’ll send some friends to do it for me.”

The radio fuzz dies as the sending node turns off. I grab my gun for one last bullet and shoot the radio, then slump to the ground, shaking as the adrenaline leaves my body with the grace of a freight train.

Evanescently, and thank god for it, I am left alone to recover while Sherlock bolts to the other room. In the distance I hear “Girls call your sisters, even the grey ones.” There’s no pause for breath before Sherlock changes the direction of his orders. “Actually, have the grey ones and the daddies meet us at the Silverfish diner.” A weighted pause, “Stay safe, please.” That last word, that ‘please’ sounds so foreign on those thin lips. I see more flashes, these ones tinged grey and blue like a dying bruise. A pool where I shake and I can see the pain in his eyes, a rooftop and a phone call that make me want to vomit, a gunshot wound to the chest and the ambulance isn’t fast enough, a dark room and he’s holding a gun to his throat, he’s sitting on the ground and he’s hurting so bad and he calls me a soldier and I help him up and we march on through the greys and the pain.

Somehow these thoughts pull me off the ground and I find that Sherlock is staring at me undecidedly, but he smothers the expression when he notices I’m noticing it. “Well, let’s be off then, we’ll want to get there before the girls do.”

He starts walking, stiffly, and I follow.

A cramp comes unbidden to my leg and that slows me considerably, but I can still mostly keep up. I consider finding a cane from some corpse to ease my way, but there isn’t anything like that so conveniently located.

Dodging around puddles and downing splicers with uncanny plasmid-wielding ability, Sherlock doesn’t need my help in the slightest to escape. I’m left to pick off whatever trails us or the ones that peek from the shadows.

The Silverfish Diner is a decrepit, moist place with leaks and rubble occupying most of where people would have been– but, really, that description fits the whole of Rapture. We wait out front, picking off all the splicers Jim Moriarty can hope to send with the practiced ease of two men who know a battlefield and how to be soldiers.

Gradually, more and more Little Sisters of all skin tones, hair colors, dispositions, and mutations join us, and we send them to sit in the booths to avoid injury. With the grey ones come Daddies. It feels peculiar to fight with one, as opposed to against. Some of them fall; some of them came to us already falling. There is a lot of crying going on with the grey ones, and those cured try in vain to comfort them.

When a lucid child with blonde hair and hazel eyes crawls from a vent and sprints across the veritable minefield of corpses and gunfire and explosive plasmids, she wastes no time in telling us she is the last of them and Sherlock picks her up very gently in his arms before motioning me to follow him inside the diner’s front door.

It’s my job to turn all the sisters back to normal, and when I asked Sherlock why he wouldn’t help me with it, he said “You’ve got the plasmid for it.” When I parried with a query as to why he didn’t also get the plasmid, he shrugged “If I were capable don’t you think I’d have done this long ago?” None of it makes sense to me, but I’m getting the message behind that cold glare that means I’m probably an idiot, and it feels very aggravating and annoyingly familiar. In between the flashes of bright light signalling the curing of another Little Sister into a human child, I get more flashes of memory.

The damn things are picking up their frequency. In this round I get two nostalgically comfortable chairs, a pile of gold, a housegirl who really needs to be shut up, breathing heavy in an alley after chasing a criminal and _god_ it feels so good I could just grab that stupid man and–

“John.”

That is my name.

The realization strikes me particularly hard as I hear the name over and over in a thousand singular voices: shocked, worried, loving, bemused, proud, upset, angry–

“John?”

“Hm…?” Somewhere in my introspection I’d sank to the floor, my head lolls back and maybe I fainted. The girls look distantly concerned. Sherlock looks perplexedly fascinated.

“We’re going. Are you fine to–… function?”

I get the urge to touch the hand that lays dormant at Sherlock’s side. There’s no reason to do that, so I curb the unnatural impulse, but the urge exists.

“We should tell them.” A new, sweet voice coos from somewhere behind the kitchen door of the diner. And immediately I am on my feet to see what it is, 6 feet of socially awkward science man following.

“Now would be a bad time.” An equally new, equally sweet man’s voice responds thoughtfully.

“Oh, but look at them! They’re distraught! And poor John–”

“What about me?” I demand fervently as I round the corner, but no one is there. Clearly there were voices; I can tell Sherlock heard them from the lack of focus in his eyes detailing an immediate detour into his brain– why can I tell that from just barely glancing over my shoulder? He must be easy to read, I don’t know.

More importantly, there were voices and now there are no bodies to hold the voices. More importantly than any of that is the… indescribable, colorless… rip… in the space where a wall should be.

This space isn’t grey, it isn’t white or black, it just has absolutely no color as it phases in and out of shaky resolution. The edges are like torn paper, as if we’re in a coloring book and someone has torn a hole in the page.

A crack sounds behind us: glass windows are being assaulted. All the girls, and there really is quite a lot of them when they’re all crowded into a tiny kitchen, cram back towards us in an attempt to get away from the assumed splicers. They’re mostly terrified, but also oddly calm. No doubt they’ve seen pinches worse than this one.

“Sherlock.” I request politely. His eyes snap open abruptly and he begins marching through the sea of girls and noise towards the unstable rip in color.

“Well let’s be off, then.” He announces before stepping past me.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Eighty-seven percent… If those odds make you uncomfortable, take it up with our friends outside.”

“And we’re going–…?”

“Not here. And that’s all that matters for the moment.”

And Sherlock Holmes steps through the portal.

Unquestioningly, the girls follow him, and I count them as they pass me. Twenty-nine. Where in God’s name could we safely take twenty-nine eight-year-old girls? I’m the last one left, and I find myself nervous as I reach out with a foot that looks certain of its steps.

“Not so bad, hm?” I hear a voice utter, first indistinctly but clearing up like a radio tuning to a station.

My feet are on solid ground that looks the same and I’m facing a wall with the same texture but I can tell by the new, yellower light filling the room that we’re anywhere but Rapture.


	8. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, guys, it's your good pals, and they're really out here, doing shit. Wow (read that in an Owen Wilson voice). Do we make progress? For heaven's sake no! We just hint at progress and foreshadow, what buffoon does otherwise? Ok I'll stop foolin and let y'all read.

Turning to assess my surroundings, I find our company in a brick storeroom well-lit by large colonial archways on one wall. Boxes labeled ‘provisions’ litter the ground and the occasional gun or box of ammo has been shoved amongst them. I hold my wrench tighter. Outside those archways is really the amazing thing: chalky blue skies and a warm ball of fire I have to assume is the sun– although I have no recollection of ever seeing it– there are clouds all over the sky with buildings nesting in them, and cobblestone walkways house a striking lack of people. I am suddenly struck by both a freedom from and longing for the deeper color of blue ( _blue scarf blue eyes blue suit blue face choking choking call the ambulance blue pen blue rain)._ that the sunlit sky lacks.

“Where are we?” I murmur, more to myself than to any actual person. I can tell by the aggravated silence that Sherlock has no more clue than I do. More pointedly, more certainly, I wonder “What do we do now, then?”

I don’t get an answer immediately, but I do get a warbled, megaphone-sounding voice telling me in the calmest tones “The False Shepherd has stolen the Lamb. Please, stay in your homes and report any suspicious activity to the authorities. The False Shepherd is armed and dangerous, do not approach him under any circumstances. Hide your wives and children. Take up arms. Columbia is protected by the Pilgrims of her city.” It droned on for several minutes with things of that sort before cutting out again.

“That’s not us, is it?” I ask politely, resignedly, feeling the familiar sock of constant escape already well-worn to my new feet.

A harsh scoff escaped thin lips, “Of course it isn’t; we’ve only just gotten here.”

The girls are getting anxious. They have never seen the sun either, and it’s too bright for their large eyes and pale skin.

“What do we do now?” I repeat, shaking Sherlock from a trail of thought somewhere outside the open archways.

He blinks at me strangely for several seconds before answering abruptly, “Hide them. The girls, hide them. We have to go figure out how to get off of this,” and he spits out these words like a personal offense, “ _floating city_ , and then when we have secured a way down, we can come back for them.” His mouth is moving as fast as his brain, which is never a good plan, I don’t think.

“Where do we hide them?” I ask, keeping my voice as level as I can muster.

He takes a deep breath that doesn’t seem to slow him down as much as project his annoyance, “There,” and he points to a random house out of the several around us. I throw my hands up n exaggerated exasperation and it draws a giggle from the girls. “Unoccupied,” Sherlock clarifies, the edge of his voice left with their laugh, but there’s still the taut cord of tension, “hasn’t even been rented out yet– you can see the empty rooms through the window because the last agent showing the place didn’t bother to close the curtains. Nobody is going to be looking in there– and you girls know how to lock doors and windows, yes? Yes.” He’s going to run out of steam if he keeps going like this, but the little ones are accustomed to it and wait for me to give them the all clear before emerging into the sunlight. After so long underwater, direct sunlight burns everyone’s skin a bit, and I’m glad when we make it to the other side of the street, under the shade of the rows of houses, and enter the one pointed out.

It’s spacious, there’s only one entrance, all the windows have thick red curtains, it’s perfect.

“Now, Delphine, you’re not the oldest, but you’re the smartest,” Sherlock tells a girl in a yellow dress turned gold with dirt and use and age, “You’re in charge until we come back.”

“Okay, Papa,” she answers with a nervous smile. “Don’t open the door, don’t look out the windows, don’t talk to anybody, and don’t be loud.”

“Good girl. We’ll be back soon.”

And then we leave.

 

We wander the city like ghosts, and my head is on a swivel like it belongs there. It feels natural. He stops to look at a map and I get more flashes of memory, all pink and blue shades of a baby and a home and a corpse on the floor and an old woman’s smile. I find myself sitting down when I come back to my own body, and I hear a panicked voice saying “John–” instead of “help.”

I flounder for a moment, and find that both Sherlock and I are sitting down where we’d previously been standing. He’s out of breath– and apparently so am I.

“You’re seeing these too?” I demand, both incredulous and hopeful. If this strange little man is seeing the same hallucinations as me, we might both still be crazy, but at least not alone.

He moves to stand, but ends up just staying where he is, “So it would seem.”

“Do you know what they mean?”

“You’re the medical man.”

“I’m a what?”

There’s a deep, heavy, physically painful sigh of disappointment, “Apparently we have these visions at the same time,” he notes, “but do not see the same things.”

I hear him, but don’t really listen, because I am much more focused on the pair of hooligans standing a few feet away. The man, tall and stout, has a chalkboard detailing coin flip outcomes, there seems about an equal number of both; the woman, slim and short, holds an ornate china tray with a single coin. I scramble to my feet, as does Sherlock on my right.

“Heads,” the man starts with a grin.

“Or tails,” the woman finishes.

The voices are familiar, and I recognize them from the Silverfish Diner. “Who are you?” I demand, reach for a gun and finding a wrench.

“Heads,” the man repeats,

“Or tails,” their voices are laughing, their faces grinning. They don’t seem to mean danger, but I’ve seen wider smiles mean worse things– I think.

They toss me the coin, I flip it begrudgingly, not liking the feeling of doing as I am told, but fitting it utterly. It lands on tails. I slap it back onto the tray, and it is immediately handed to Sherlock, who flips it with calculating eyes that send chills up my spine: he gets heads.

“Told you,” the man says, as if she were being particularly stubborn and he had known better all along. His smile flickers, “I never find that as satisfying as I imagine it.”

She pats his chin with a gracious smile that implies _he_ was being stubborn and she was merely putting up with him. “Chin up, there’s always next time.”

“I suppose there is,” and before I can say a word, they’ve walked off down an alleyway. When Sherlock and I attempt a chase, they’re gone. This seems to be their pattern. Show up, say something cryptic, disappear.

I am wary of the specters, but also more than a little too exasperated and rushed and confused to care. “Well,” I start, but I don’t finish.

“Yes, I suppose so,” Sherlock assents to the nothingness I stated.

We continue walking, and it becomes quickly apparent that this area of town is under construction, hence the lack of other humans and the surplus of abandoned buildings. The girls will be very safe where we left them.

At some point we reach the edge of the platform this neighborhood is supported by, and we follow that edge until the sun reaches the top of the sky, and we find a wavering bridge to another, less desolate part of town. In the far distance, we can see a statue of an angel, and there’s a ginormous bird flapping its wings desperately around her head.

“That, um,” I swallow, a little nervously, “that doesn’t look promising.”

Sherlock frowns, “Not really, no.” There’s more people that direction, more chaos, less ways to hide, and a giant bird that looks somewhat malicious.

Still, we need a way down to the normal earth– not the underwater purgatory we came from and not the skyborn heaven we are in, but the wonderful and solid ground. Everything in Rapture was immutable and overgrown and dark. Everything here is evanescent and neat and bright. Both are awful, I just want an in between: I want that place of my visions with two comfortable armchairs with everything everywhere and always moving but always nearby with just enough light to see by on dark nights and a warm radiance for excited mornings. I want home– goddamn the fact that I am talking about hallucinations of places I have never even seen.

“Coming, John?” Sherlock invites, tone more careless than the way he’s crossing the bridge as it pitches slightly with the current of the winds under it.

His footing looks so sure until it doesn’t.  ****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so long! I got busy, lost track of what was going on in life, the usual noise. Trying to update at some sort of reasonable pace now, but don't quote me on that. Maybe once a week? I write fanfiction on the weekends usually so that sounds about right... Bear with me y'all we're going places. Sorry for long notes here.


	9. IX

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone almost dies, and someone gets away.

The bridge sways, wobbles, is generally unsteady, and before I know it I am the only thing holding Sherlock above a very far fall. We’re both breathing heavily, and if he weren’t so damn tall, so damn heavy, if I weren’t so damn weak, I’d just yank him up.

But he is that tall and heavy, and I am that weak, so I just hang on as best as I can. Somehow, all I can think of is how _wrong_ this all is: I should be on the ground and Sherlock should be a million miles up, falling, falling, and I’m trying to find a pulse and this whole I’m just wishing– “John?” My name has somehow replaced the word for “help” in Sherlock’s brain. “John, would you kindly pull me up?” On instinct, my body summons every last ounce of strength it has, and I yank Sherlock over the edge of the wavering platform. Apparently, not all of the mental conditioning is gone.

There’s a chilled look in ice eyes, “You saw it too?” I whisper hoarsely– had I been screaming?

“I saw something.” A distracting pause. “They’re getting more vivid. We need a cure.”

Gunshots sound in the nearby distance, we are on instant alert. There’s the clank of heavy, unrefined machinery and the dull deafening of a primeval shotgun. Two figures can be made out, sprinting toward us, and I’m instantly on my feet, fever dreams forgotten, holding my wrench as a weapon while electricity crackles through my veins.

“John, put the wrench down,” Sherlock starts, and when I don’t waver, he rips it from my hand and shoves it in his waistband. His face is determined and panicky. He recognizes them, somehow. “Nevermind, John, take the wrench back, get one of those hooks from a policeman’s arm.” My brain screams at me to ignore him, to stick right next to him and not leave, to hold his hand and run from the police, but I do as he says with a grumpy feeling. It’s only marginally harder to take out a policeman with a gun than a splicer with a gun, and soon I am in possession of my very own–… spinny hook thing. Sherlock gets one too, and he calls for me over the sound of gunshots that are fading in and out of sandy backdrops. My brain has quickly proven itself untrustworthy and easily confused: I could be in a dense cityscape or a seamless desert or a skyline suburbia, I can’t tell.

I remember very quickly where I am when Sherlock drags me off of the edge of the wavering bridge and we fall at least ten feet before catching on a railing. These spinny hook things are transportation. We are flying down this railing at at least sixty miles an hour, following the two figures that Sherlock seems to know. At least, we are until a giant bird made out of metal and cloth swoops in and wrecks the railing. After that, we are just flying down past the railing at who knows how fast, preceded narrowly by the two figures in front of us.

We hit water, warmer than the Atlantic, and with an artificial sway to it. The impact knocks the air from my lungs and, impulsively, I inhale too much water to spit back out. A current drags me one way, and I let it take me because I can’t even open my eyes to find up. When a set of thick, wool arms drag me another way, I am reminded of a well of bones, and the only difference is that there’s no chain here, just the dead weight of my body: this time, I am the dead one.

Soon enough I’m laid out on cool sand, barely grasping at the last vestiges of consciousness, there’s footsteps running and fading away, Sherlock’s voice grumbles from somewhere, disembodied. I am sat up, head supported, and a hand slams into my back jarringly. Once (gunshot in a college), twice (ricochet in a tunnel), thrice (explosion on a moor), four times (bullet wound through the chest call an ambulance keep pressure stay alive), and then a mouthful of water came up my trachea.

“John? John, look at me.”

“Hmm?” My eyes are bleary, and it’s dark enough that I can’t see much of anything past those glowing blue eyes.

“Good,” I am laid back down, but now I feel cold and miss the contact, even with the intermediary gloves, “I’m going to stop them. They have answers we need.”

“Comin’” I slur, starting to sit up on my own.

Sherlock literally pushes me back to the ground with a bundle of fabric, “Stay here, keep this, the both of you would just slow me down.” And he whirls around and sprints off into the night.

 

“Oh, come on Mike!” The old woman whines when I wake up, “Look at them, they’re so confused. We should just tell them.”

I try to sit up, only to find I already am sitting up, leaning heavily into sherlock’s side, his coat wrapped tightly around me. I find I can’t remember more than snatches of feelings: heavy water, cold sand, evanescent warmth. I’m shivering, and Sherlock is snarling something that goes unheard. The pair he was chasing are nowhere to be found.

“Well, I suppose it was going to happen whether we facilitated it or not,” the man concedes, crossing his arms and frowning good-naturedly.

“There’s the spirit.”

“But let’s keep it a surprise.” The man’s face morphs into a smirk.

The woman mimics him, clapping her frail-looking hands together. “You devil, I like the way you think.”

“You should, we’re our own inverses.”

“Can I tell them?” The woman begs with a tittering laugh.

“But–”

“It’s my turn, you got the hospital, remember?”

A heavy sigh, “Oh, fine.”

“Okay boys.” The old woman claps her hands and grins cheekily. “I want you to hold hands.”

Almost in unison, but a beat off, Sherlock and I stuttered “What?” When he realizes I’m awake, Sherlock is immediately distracted, and demands to know if I’m okay, I tell him I’m fine, don’t worry about it.

The woman breaks up the conversation, “Well I can’t very well do it for you. Just, um, well, Sherlock take off those gloves and John grab his hand.” When Sherlock began to begrudgingly remove one glove, she coaxes “There you go.”

Feeling more than a little watched, I tentatively reach for the long, thin fingers that had previously been encased in worn leather. The moment our bare skin touched, sparks flew all over my vision.

A cozy living room, a hospital, Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

There’s a million flashes of light, a million memories, and suddenly I’m shivering from something other than the cold. I can remember every time he smiled at me, every time he was angry, every time he pulled me close or pushed me away, every time he made me tea and every time he drank mine. I can remember chasing criminals down alleyways I have never seen and I can remember sitting at home with our daughter. I can remember how much I love him, and many things make much more sense.

Silence prevailed for about half a minute as both Sherlock and I really thought about what just happened.

Finally, he said “Yes, well, that does clear things up a bit.”

But Martha Hudson and Mike Stamford were gone.


	10. Apologies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

**Okay, I just want to say I’m really sorry. I started this a long time ago, and I still love the idea, but I have no idea what direction I wanted to go in anymore. I’m leaving this– for now at least. If you’d like to copy the idea, that’s fine; hell, if you want to copy the story word for goddamned word and then just finish it differently or something, I’m fine with that too. I hate for the idea to die, but this story has been misplaced, and cannot be written until someone finds some iteration to finish it with. So take it from me and let me take my leave: contact me if you have any questions about anything. Here is the list of my character match-ups as well, for those who are curious, or just for fun.**  [Google Drive Link to Character Matchup Image/List](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7zO7SvW4Sq8NC1jWEJaX2N3S0k/view?usp=sharing)


End file.
